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Android Phones More Prone To Hardware Problems
adeelarshad82 writes "A nearly year-long study conducted by WDS on 600,000 support calls has found that Android phones are more susceptible to hardware faults than other types of devices. '14 percent of all technical support calls for Android devices could be traced to a hardware fault, versus 3.7 percent for RIM BlackBerry, 8 percent for iPhones and 9 percent for Windows Phone 7 devices.' WDS attributed the gap in hardware faults to the disparity in OEMs that manufacture Android devices."
what's the ratio of those that have slide out or fold open keyboards?
Android runs on the full gambit of available phone devices. That means on the low end, crappy hardware is there by design. Crappy hardware, by design, driven by cost considerations, are going to have less reliable hardware and less QA.
Basically the story says, "Shit happens. Sometimes free market economics create products which are far from ideal." Is anyone really surprised. Next story. I mean, that's really all that needs to be said. Duh.
Android is used on the cheapest smart phones so they use the cheapest parts....to you know...make them cheap.
Is that 96.4% of all rim support calls are for the terrible software.
WDS did not disclose how many support calls in general technicians fielded for each platform
So without saying that android phones are more or less reliable in general, what they are really saying is:
Android phones less prone to software problems.
14 percent of all technical support calls for Android devices could be traced to a hardware fault, versus 3.7 percent for RIM BlackBerry, 8 percent for iPhones and 9 percent for Windows Phone 7 devices.'
In other news: '86% of all technical support calls for Android devices could be traced to a software issue, versus 96.3 percent for RIM BlackBerry, 92 percent for iPhones and 91 percent for Windows Phone 7 devices.'
Shows how bad Android is doesn't it....
Ok, look I'm an iphone user. Love it. Have the original and waiting to get the next one. But I'm not putting too much into this little survey.
I need to see the manufacturer listed here before I believe this is any more than propoganda. If it turns out that each manuf. has about the same average fault rate, then ok, there's a problem. But if it turns out that HTC comes out to 2% and Moto is at 25% then I'd say that it's not the OS, but the manuf. that's the problem.
And then going further, how does a manufacturer's android parts compare to their non android part. What if LG has a average fail of 15% on android smartphones but only 5% on dumbphones.
Then what about those who make win7 and android phones? How does THAT compare? Samsung? HTC? LG?
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Keep in mind that this is 14% of _support calls_. Using the same logic as the summary, you could say that Android phones have fewer software issues than other phones because only 86% of calls are related to software. That is assuming there isn't a third option in support calls.
The article even states this, they don't have shipment numbers for devices so they don't have data for the phones that don't require support. Their sample is only phones that people are having problems with in the first place.
I would be curious to know if the numbers break down along any other useful lines:
For instance, are all the phones(regardless of OS and smart/dumb status) manufactured by a given OEM comparable in reliability? How about all phones by company that designed them? or Smart vs. dumb devices? Are 'flagship' devices more or less reliable than random carrier-branded contract fodder?
Unless android has some magical hardware-killing powers, it seems very unlikely that the OS itself has anything to do with it; but it is probably the case that Android will be the choice of any manufacturer playing the race-to-the-bottom price-sensitive-market volume sales game, and that is also where you would expect the most corners cut in terms of hardware. It would be interesting to try to break down, though, what factors exactly cut the hardware reliability.
Do they go with the second-tier OEMs to save money, and suffer manufacturing issues? Does the culture of tech-specs one-upmanship lead to excessively short design cycles, and inadequate engineering on the designing company's part? Is unreliably spread fairly evenly, or does it disproportionately fall on devices attempting mechanically tricky stuff like slide-out keyboards and ignore the more conservative featureless-slab or embedded-keypad designs regardless of OS?
I thought WP7 devices had only been available for about 6 months ?
Really? I've had to replace my Blackberry Storm2 about 7 times now in the last year or so. And everyone I know who has a storm or a storm 2 has had about the same exact situation. The only durable blackberries seem to be the older curves. I would think the storm and the storm2 alone would make their number much higher.
"A nearly year-long study conducted by WDS on 600,000 support calls has found that some phones are more susceptible to hardware faults than other phones."
FTFY. If you take the flamebait out of it, that's all it's saying. Android phones are manufactured by a large number of manufacturers, and some of them are a bit cheap and nasty.
Oh no... it's the future.
TFA deson't make any sense. The ratio of technical support that ends up being hardware tells us nothing about the hardware fault rate. It could simply be that people are less likely to have other problems with the phone, or that the users are more technical on average and more likely to be able to solve a non-hardware problem on their own.
For instance, let's say:
Device A: 2 million sold, 1 million support calls, 100K hardware calls
Device B: 4 million sold, 1 million support calls, 150K hardware calls
Device A: "10%"
Device B: "15%"
But really, the failure rate for A would be 5% whereas the rate for B would be 3.75%.
In short, the article's author is an idiot.
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
And let us read down a little more before I comment...
Yes, but a) your numbers are already suspect because the customer could have gone to the carrier for any kind of problem, and b) you could have reported on what percentage of the devices under your direct control were of each type, and thus we would have at least some indication, but you neglected to share that information with us, suggesting at least to me (not implying, just suggesting) that perhaps the results would suggest that another platform had higher failure rates overall in spite of higher hardware failure rates for Android. Aside from wanting to damage Android directly, another reason to neglect such results would simply be to knowingly attempt to make the study look more conclusive than it actually is for financial gain, which seems to me to be a form of fraud.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
RIM relative low number impresses me at first glance.
The iPhone and WP7 has me wondering if 7-9% is the standard, and I'll likely look to see if this is comparable for all cellphones.
Android's relative high number reminds me why I ditched my android phone for an iPhone. It was an early one, Eris. Wasn't a bad phone for the time, but six months after I bought the thing it was having trouble keeping up at Android 2.1 for the stuff I wanted to do with my phone. I liked the OS, but found my initial choice of hardware... lacking. Rooting it and removing HTC Sense made 2.1 fun, but with 2.2... *sighs*
I think it is also worth noting the two highest are more software on other people's hardware. RIM is hardware/software as is the iPhone.
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
Exactly. Compare to Win6/6.5 and you'd get lots of mediocre phones. I've had about equally poor results with 2 Win6 phones and my G1, oddly enough all made by HTC. So who funded this study?
So, if I produce a phone that has only 1 support call related to hardware and 1 related to software my hardware must be crappy, because I have 50% support calls due to hardware issues.
Something I missed?
Hey look, Slashdot is shitting on Android again. What a freaking surprise.
What about Bitcoins? We haven't heard about Bitcoins in over 24 hours and it worries me.
Glad I could help.
From TFA:
And there you have it. If the platforms had, say, the same amount of hardware trouble calls as non-Android platforms but a far lower number of software trouble calls you'd get the same result.
Without additional data we can't tell if my headline or the one from PC magazine is more accurate.
I don't know of any reason the Android-platform hardware produced by several big-name companies using modern parts and fabs should be almost four times as flakey as the non-Android-platform hardware produced by several big-name companies using modern parts and fabs. Maybe a little from this being earlier in the product life cycle. But a factor of 3.8? So I'm betting at least some of the result is from Android SOFTware being less failure prone and the article's slant being anti-Android FUD.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
My Casio Commando is a ruggedized (water,shock,vibration,salt spray) resistant Android phone...
I wouldn't expect a hw fault with it. It's hw failure rate should be pretty low.......
Other companies also produce ruggedized android phones.
Did the other phones they discuss have ruggedized versions available?
-- Sam
They probably did and since the faux issue you are referring to was actually a NON issue it didn't make any impact in this data.
right on.
Coordinated? By Apple and Microsoft?
Hey Slashdotters, looks like we've been trolled again! After that story that just was released about Android having supposedly crappier apps a couple days ago. This is just garbage. And for the past few months, I can't seem to mod these stories down.
I think the Apple schills/PR machine is turning on their control of the tech media even more (releasing thinly veiled "news stories"), because they can't realize they can win on features/openness/technical merit. I mean geez, they knock android, but don't even mention that the iPhone 4 can't even make *simple calls* properly* (read: antennagate)?
I think my days of "Chips and Dip" are over. I'm thinking it's time to retire the old UID.
I'm an Apple fanboy but even I can see through my Apple coloured glasses and recognize that this is entirely slanted. Comparing phones made by Apple (one manufacturer) and RIM (one manufacturer) to Android phones (how many manufacturers?...) is entirely unfair. I'd like to see how HTC does. How about Samsung. Compare manufacturers to manufacturers. Apples to apples, if you pardon the pun. The might as well compare Apple's and RIM's phones to American automobiles for all the value the information provides...
Without knowing any of the details of the study (Witch the study maker would not disclose). This is completely meaningless. For all we know, of the 600,000 calls only 7 were for android an only one of those for hardware problems.
I'm sure that this is not the case but unless we can see some hard data there is no way to determine the real hardware problem rate of these devices.
I have to call bullshit on this article. 14% of technical support calls were related to hardware faults, but it says nothing of the per capita rates of technical service calls. I find it far more likely that either a) android is far more easy to deal with issues yourself or b) used by a more technical user base. Either of these situations would result in less calls related to software issues, which would make the % of support calls that are hardware related go up significantly. Until they release information about the ratio of hardware calls to devices, this is nothing but a bullshit article.
AJ Henderson
Bad experiences with crappy hardware running Android will tarnish the Android name in the consumer's mind.
That what.
I love my Nexus One, but I have to say the statistics are probably true. I have to reboot it a couple of times per week - the touch screen stops working, or the screen just turns black when I am receiving or making a call. Sometimes I have to resort to removing the battery. A co-worker with a Nexus One is having similar problems, so it is not that my specific device is defective.
As much as I hate Apple, my wife's IPhone 3GS hasn't had any problems whatsoever and she's had it for longer.
When you include Yugos, Trabants, and Ladas, foreign cars have much worse reliability than Ford.
I really hate it when the media writes dumbassed articles like this. "Let's compare phones made by 30 different companies with a phone made by 1 company and see if there are quality variations." Abject stupidity.
"I disagree with you" does not equal "flamebait."
Errrrnttt. Nice try. You are correct that the article is committing a statistical error, but so are you. Technical support calls range the gamut from questions, software problems, hardware problems, user errors, help on setup and installation, etc. And you can't lump all the nonhardware issues into "problems strictly with the software" per se because a question could be as simple as "how do I install this" but could be more intricate like asking value added questions about how to best set up wifi or what settings are best to get maximize battery life. And some of those calls might fall outside the realm of the phone like "sorry the problem is not in your phone but your router/printer/computer/etc."
You also have to factor in user fatigue. If your first problem is a hardware problem where the phone doesn't even work, you're less likely to keep calling back about other problems because you just get tired of dealing with it.
Also the only scrap of information we have here from the article is that they separated out hardware calls from everything else. We have absolutely NO idea what those other issues are. They state "problems" but problems aren't the only reason to call technical support and by their own paramaters of the study they didn't appear to really look at those other calls to state they were actual problems.
Given the data in the article, the statement that 14% of Android phone calls are on hardware issues is meaningless. The statement that percentage wise, that 92% of iPhone calls are software problems is also meaningless. So you have an article and a comment, both meaningless. More numbers need to be revealed to make this meaningful.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
What "Android name in the consumer's mind"?
People see TV commercials, posters, and other material promoting marks and models of handsets, such as Droid, EVO, Galaxy, etc., not Android.
The same is true for the competition: consumers purchase iPhones and iPods, not "iOS devices."
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
Some of you may be interested in this presentation that was recently given at Velocity - has some good stats about the big three smartphones - http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/60/iOS%20vs_%20Android%20vs_%20Blackberry%20%E2%80%93%20Bakeoff%20Presentation.pdf
Bad experiences with crappy hardware running Android will tarnish the Android name in the consumer's mind.
Only if consumers are buying an Android phone. The advertising I see usually pushes the carrier or the manufacturer. Android is a bullet statement. For example, driving in to work I heard an Ad for Cricket offering the Ascend phone "powered by Android" (manufactured by Chinese company Huawei - I suspect this is right in line with the subject at hand). Which leads me to wonder what name will come to mind if the consumer looks at their device and decides it's a crappy phone. Will they blame Cricket, Huawei (which doesn't even get air time - maybe consumers will identify it simply as the Ascend), or Android?
man, what a bunch of bullshit. Android is the software, and has NOTHING to do with the hardware problems they may have.
This is like saying "windows machines have more hardware problems than linux machines."
I am an iphone user, had a galaxy S previously, and I understand what they are saying - but don't throw mud on HTC's hardware when you're really talking about some shitty kyocera handset that happens to run android 1.1!
Well sure, them too. But mostly the Illuminati.
Now, PR people do understand this, and they do sometimes drop hit pieces. But the natural defense mechanism is that there are people who actively follow this stuff and look for those kinds of shenanigans. For example, here's a story that accuses the Obama administration of feeding a story to the WaPo. When PR people try to stir up a story, it's very easy to be caught out, so that naturally limits them to dropping a few hints.
The article is over five years old, but I think it still is quite applicable today: The Submarine. The trick seems to be having awareness of this manipulation, looking for it, and being able to communicate those findings. Politics breeds that kind of watchdog (especially in the current environment). But I don't think you'll find it in every arena on every issue.
That's not to say your view lacks insight. I suspect there is a lot of news that is news because it was in the news - especially within tech. But I also suspect that simply leaves tech news wide open to manipulation either by priming the pump or providing information to feed the cycle beneficial to your message. And unlike the political arena, tech watchdogs rarely become the news which greatly reduces the effectiveness of uncovering manipulation.
More manufacturers, more handset models, more components = more faults.
Windows phone 7?? A year?
Try since November 8, 2010, for the USA.
7 months or so. Not even close to 'nearly a year.'
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Android's API includes a number of functions for causing various hardware malfunctions. They are designed for use by the carriers. The carriers occasionally invoke them in order to increase their sales. Apple & RIM lock their phones down. The carriers can't mess with them, so they don't accrue these benefits. Sound good?
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
While not directly related to Android, the findings should have been expected. Everyone wanted to compete with iDevices. Android seemed to offer the flexibility that would been needed in the kernel and the OS, so it was a no-brainer: Android to emulate or even surpass the features of various iDevices. Going to the makers, however, they needed to produce devices that could compete roughly toe-to-toe on price, or, even better, offer a better value than iAnything. Thus, the race to cheap began.
Only time and retrospect will tell us whether it was rushed engineering, poor component quality, or a combination of factors, but device makers wanted to get to market fast and they wanted to get to market cheap. Overall, that's one area where Apple has held a steady keel--they've resisted pressure to drop their prices, and doing so has let them execute greater control over the quality. They're not problem free, by any means, but they simply have a tighter grip on the hardware side which makes things on the software side so much smoother.
In some ways, it reminds me of the early days of the PC clone market. You could get components everywhere, but often the quality was a mixed bag, and it even continued as newer technologies emerged. I'm sure many here remember dealing with sound cards, optical drives, and other componnents that claimed to be (then) cutting-edge technologies, but which were severly hampered by lousy chipsets and other signposts from the race to cheap. The good news is that the markets will shake out the makers (device and componnent level) who can't produce quality devices. Hopefully, however, that shakeout won't take too long, or take down too many formerly key players in the process.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Motorolla makes a bunch of the phones. I am personally on my 3rd moto droid in under 2 years, and know 2 other people with the same issue.
brickspeed.net for your old Volvo performance addiction
I got two G1's about 16 months ago for free. When the wife's touch screen died, I called several cell phone repair stores and got a 100% response ratio of "Android phones (all of them, not just the G1's) are too hard to work on". The prices quoted made it cheaper for me to buy a used working cell phone than get it repaired, and the store owners agreed. They couldn't even guarantee that the touchscreen would work if replaced and advised me that it could be a 50-50 chance the repair wouldn't work and I'd still have to pay them.
Since then, I've been having second thoughts about getting another Android phone when my current contract runs out.
I'm good with numbers -
Yes but in those same commercials there is always a tagline like "powered by Android" or "runs on Android". Even if the consumer has no real idea what Android is, they may associate it with the phone.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Has the author considered that the percentage of support calls for hardware problems is higher because there are simply less calls for software issues ?
Percentages don't mean a thing if you don't compare the total number of phones sold to the number of calls...
Apple camp nervous and running amok. Unable to comprehend 12% vs. 50% market share* and how it relates to service calls.
[*] - http://www.pcworld.com/article/226339/android_market_share_growth_accelerating_nielsen_finds.html
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A fundamentally broken metric: "percent of all technical support calls".
A completely incorrect interpretation of that metric: "Android Phones More Prone To Hardware Problems".
If you want to argue that "Android Phones More Prone To Hardware Problems", then you need to know the number phones of each type that have hardware failures, and total phones of each type (or possibly total usage hours of each) -- and neither of those are known or estimated here. Other possible explanations for higher "percent of all technical support calls" could be perhaps that Android users are more knowledgeable about software and fix those problems on their own. But we can't know either way from this report:
"WDS did not disclose how many support calls in general technicians fielded for each platform. The study covered 600,000 support calls from June 2010 to May 2011 and covered Europe, North America, South Africa and Australia. Tim Deluca-Smith, the vice president of marketing for WDS, said that the overall percentages of support calls by platform were difficult to measure. The company refers to those as the 'propensity to call,' the percentage of devices that would display a problem in any given batch over a 12-month period."
Frankly, that smells goddamn fishy to me. You know the percentage of calls per-phone that are for hardware issues, but not the percentage of calls per phone? You've got a metric with an established name like "propensity to call" but claim no effective way to measure it? That doesn't make any sense.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
So just 18 Windows Phone 7 devices were affected versus, what, thousands of Android devices? That's pretty good for Microsoft!
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Anyone can sell an Android phone so there is a lot of shit out there.
No, its an issue of course.
The problem is ... that even if you held it incorrectly, it was STILL in the top 3 of reception quality and ability to not drop calls.
Meaning that yes, it drops calls more often if you hold it like you normally would ... however ... it STILL DOES BETTER THAN THE COMPETITION on its baad days.
So from a practical perspective ... if on the iPhone 4's shittiest of days, it STILL does better than most of the other phones in its class, which means its a non-issue from a practical perspective. So even if people report the bad reception quality when holding an iPhone 4 normally ... they STILL made less reports than pretty much everyone else.
So ... if you want to talk issues, lets talk about all the phones that drop calls regardless of how you hold them ... go ahead, get some stats for whichever device you're fanboying it up that shows it doing better under any condition than the iPhone4 does under the worst conditions (i.e. holding the antenna in a way that shorts it).
Don't worry, I'm not going to wait, I've seen the stats.
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I didn't read TFA (because I don't care about phones), but I don't need to do it to tell that the news title in /. is stupid. Having the stats of 14% of problems being due to hardware doesn't tell the global failure rate. So, let's say we have 0.00001% of failure rate with android phones, and 1% with others, with still 14% of problems being due to hardware on the Android platform, that doesn't make Android more susceptible for hardware issue, does it? So, either the linked article is stupid, either the summary's title is.
Android's niche is bleeding edge, so it's bound to be less stable. Android is on a multitude of devices, so it's bound to be less stable. Blaming the hardware is too easy for the average luser and I saw no indication from the article that they distinguished between real hardware problems and purported hardware problems. Do you have any idea how many "defective" phones get "refurbished" by simply being wiped ?
Personally, I would like to see a stable version of Android that's meant for users who want something with more stability than features. But then I use CentOS on my desktop, so I'm just nutty that way.
"WDS did not disclose how many support calls in general technicians fielded for each platform. " WTF!!? This makes the data virtually useless for comparing platforms. From the same data we could just as validly say iOS and BB devices are more prone to software failures! This article is stupid.
This would be more meaningful if we had stats on the number of issues vs. number of phones sold, and comparison numbers for other types of phones. Currently, as suggested above, this could also, easily, be interpreted as "Wow, so few Software issues they ROCK!"
Tis I: Me.
One would expect a $30 phone (on contract) would be flaky compared to a $200 phone (on contract). I notice low end android phones follow that rule (as their high end models are definitely better).
Then again a $300 phone (on contract) that can't make decent phone calls cause of it antenna design....
tl;dr
yes, no, maybe, probably, and whatever it is you don't need to know.
Since they don't show call volume vs number of devices, only percentage of calls that turn out to be for a hardware fault, it could just as easily be that Android software gets screwed up less or confuses the users less (or the users are more expert). That would make for a higher percentage of calls for hardware problems on equally reliable devices.
It could also be a simple matter of Android helplines being more willing to admit to a hardware problem rather than claiming user error or endlessly demanding a reset to factory until the caller is exhausted enough to just live with the problem.
pcMag and just about any other decent web site this week now have step by step how to create new malware for Android intstructions so simple that an absolute moron can create new custom malware for Android. That simple step by step knowledge should have never been posted to the web!
Google needs to act fast and tighten up the free and open part of Android or no one will want to buy Android as the word gets out any idiot can tamper with the apps you may download, even from the Market. . Creating malware for anything but Android requires a fair amount of programing skills but you can be wiped out on drugs or drunk and knock out Android malware now, no skill required.
Malware scanners need to be immediately made a mandatory part of the default basic Android OS.
Then you can get down to worrying if you really have crap Android hardware.
What the hell does PHP have anything to do with Android hardware faults? Just curious.
Study shows Android phones less prone to software problems. Same study. It's all in what you want it to look like.
What if android software is so much better than iOS/WP7/blackberryOS that a larger percentage of the failures are hardware related?